A Book of Tongues

Gemma Files

Completed 8/24/2018, Reviewed 8/24/2018

3 stars

This was a fantasy/horror Western, a tale of the weird West.  After finishing it, I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not.  The premise is interesting and the horror parts are intense, but I found it very hard to read.  I found the dialogue hard to follow in that it’s very Western twangy.  I guess it was very authentic, at least in the way we perceive the Old West’s way of speaking.  The prose was very complex, though not pretentious.  It made the whole reading experience rather exhausting.  There were times where it was very hard to follow.  The book was nominated for a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for best novel with positive LGBT content, so at least some people thought it was really good.  I’m settling for calling it good, because I had such mixes feelings about it. 

Ash Rook is a Civil War chaplain from the South who is wrongly hanged for killing his commander.  He survives the hanging through supernatural intervention, awakening his latent wizardly powers, though here he’s called a hex, as in hex-slinger.  The actual killer, Chess Pargeter, joins him, as do a few others from their regimen, as they journey to Arizona.  With Rook wielding supernatural powers and trigger-happy Chess, they decide to become outlaws, and Chess and Rook become lovers.  However, Rook has strange dreams of an Aztec goddess calling him to become a god like her.  Then Ed Morrow, an agent sent to infiltrate Rook’s gang to bring down the hex-slinger, joins the gang.  Together they cast spells and murder their way south eventually making their way to Mexico, where they literally go through Hell to find the destiny that awaits them. 

The book depicts violence quite graphically, mostly through the character of Chess.  Chess is an immature amoral who kills people who cross him the wrong way.  He’s a rotten kid with a bad temper and great aim.  He kills quite a few people over the course of this book with no hesitation and no regrets.  Chess makes no bones about being gay and doesn’t care who knows, considering how good he is with a gun.  The sex is also relatively graphic.  So if you don’t like sex and violence, this is not the book for you.  However, the sex and violence are germane to the plot.  It gives you strong sense of who Chess is and what makes him tick.  Despite the terrible nature of Chess, I found I liked him, despicable as he was.  He’s definitely an anti-hero, along the lines of the Bonnie and Clyde. 

Rook and Ed are also major characters with the story being told through their points of view, as well as Chess’.  I imagine Rook as being a middle-aged Sam Elliot, slow-talking and relatively level-headed.  He wields his hexing power via quotations from the Bible.  And he’s madly in love with Chess.  Ed is basically the moral compass in the group, watching all this with horror and intrigue. 

My biggest problems with the book were the dialogue and the prose.  They were very difficult to read.  I found myself often rereading passages because I didn’t get them the first time.  As I mentioned above, the dialogue is “authentic” Old West speaking patterns.  The prose particularly was very complex.  I don’t exactly know how to describe it.  It wasn’t contrived metaphors like in “Yiddish Policemen’s Union”.  The best way I can put it is that it felt like it was nonlinear, making me lose the flow of the story. 

I give this book three stars out of five, giving it props for the premise and the Sam Peckinpah-like realism.  I took points off for the complexity of the prose and the speaking patterns.  You should also know that the book is the first in a series that ends in a cliffhanger.  I didn't take points off for that, I was just glad I understood the ending.